Posted on: 29 Sep 2019
[Reply to a question by Shri Ngherappa]
Swami replied: Doubt is most welcome, but the discussion should remove the doubt and create faith. Doubt is the seed, discussion is the grown tree and faith is the final fruit of the tree. The fruit is naturally given the highest importance. Blind faith is the rotten, poisonous fruit lying by the side of the road. The person who wants to avoid the hard work of growing the tree (discussion), is fascinated by the rotten fruit fallen by the roadside. Faith obtained after a long discussion from all angles, is certainly the healthiest fruit and it gives you the healthiest fortune. Hence, you must start with doubt alone and not with blind faith even if the blind faith is an old tradition. Just because a blind belief was held by people for a very long time, it does not mean that it becomes correct. The length of time that a belief has been held does not, in any way, contribute to its correctness. Perhaps, a tenant occupying your rented house might be in a position to use his long duration of occupation to claim some right to the house. But the darkness residing in a closed room for even a hundred years, is forced to vanish in a fraction of the second when sunlight enters the room. The darkness cannot claim its right to continue to occupy the room! Similarly, a false concept, blindly followed by the public for several generations as a tradition, cannot be claimed to be correct based on that long duration. This example was given by Śaṅkara. If you do not make any effort to clear your doubt through discussion, you will only be left with the seed, which will get rotten, in the course of time (saṃśayātmā vinaśayti—Gita). The Satguru or the contemporary Human Incarnation is the best to clarify all types of doubts in the most perfect way.
samshayaatmaa vinashayti Shankara